The LanParte TS-02 V2 is without a doubt the best budget lens support out there. Very well designed, quality build and very good looking too. It's more expensive than most budget lens supports, but I think it's worth it because most importantly it does a cracking job at supporting a telephoto lens. I have one of the cheapest lens supports sold on ebay and it's no where as good as TS-02 V2, so really I should have splashed out on the beauty rather than trying to save as much as I can. Lesson hopefully learned.

Thanks to the guys atwww.cinegearpro.com letting be try this out and run some tests with it. You can get the TS-02 from them for pretty much the same price you'd pay on ebay, but with proper customer support and warranty + fast delivery for those of you based in UK. If you are based in London like myself, you visit their showroom to see and try this lens support yourself before handing over your hard earned cash.

To celebrate my new website, vintagelensesforvideo.com, I’m doing a biggest lens giveaway so far, giving away 6 lenses, so the chance of winning is better than ever! The lenses I’m giving away are Helios 58mm f/2 primes. They are great for low light and archiving a very nice, shallow depth of field and beautiful, dreamy flares. I’ve tested these lenses and I was really impressed with the performance, in fact it’s currently one of my favourite budget lenses. You can check out the test videos on my youtube channel if you haven’t done it already.

The Pentax SMC 200mm f/2.5 is quite a unique lens. The most impressive feature that jumps into your eyes straight away is a really fast aperture of f2.5. When you take the lens into your hand, you can tell it a serious one. Large, heavy, built like a tank, great long through smooth focusing ring, this lens is a pleasure to use. However non of this matters if optics can’t deliver. The SMC 200mm definitely delivers nice images; no wonder it’s still popular and quite expensive for a vintage lens. These are going for over £400/$700 on eBay, so not what you would call an absolute bargain. While it’s nice and sharp, is it really worth paying so much over, let’s say a very nicely performing and really cheap Tokina 80-200mm f/2.8 ?

Well, YES and NO, it really depends on what is your priority. Pentax produces really sharp images even wide open and doesn’t really need to be stepped down by a stop like Tokina to get a decent sharpness. Contrast, clarity and colours are also really good. On a downside of course is a higher price, no flexibility of a fast zoom lens. There is also quite a lot of red chromatic aberration in many lighting situations, stepping down the lens helps, but you have to be at f/5.6 to get rid of it almost completely, which is less than perfect. And at the end of the day, how much difference does actually f2.5 makes comparing to f2.8. Well not that much really, it’s only a third of a stop and while it does affect the brightness and bokeh a little bit as you’ve probably seen in the test above, alone it’s not worth paying the extra $400 and should not be the reason for choosing it over f2.8 lenses, unless you want to show off.

I don’t need and can’t afford to keep both Tokina 80-200mm f2.8 and Pantax 200 f2.5, so I decided to sell one. Which I’m keeping? Tokina wins for me. Much more flexibility, still really fast at f2.8, it produces very beautiful images and it’s really cheap making it a great value for money lens, which is what I value a lot. One other reason why Pantax had to go, is because it also focuses the same way Nikon lenses do. Most of my lenses focus in the same direction as Canon, so I’m used to such workflow when shooting gorilla style and even more importantly with a follow focus. Pantax could be a great choice for Nikkor lens user and while it’s a bit expensive in my option, comparing to modern lenses, it offers a lot of the money. Like most vintage lenses it’s much more suitable for video work than most modern lenses: great, long through focus ring with hard stops, manual aperture adjustment ( can be adapted to most cameras with a simple, cheap adapter).

While I’m not keeping mine, there is a place for this lens and if you find one for under £400/$700 it might be worth giving it a good closer look.

Tokina AT-X 80-200mm is one of the most exciting vintage lenses I have in my current collection. I was really keen to try to since I bought it a few months ago. My lens has a Minolta MD mount, which requires an adapter with additional lens for it to work properly with Canon EOS DSLRs, so I didn’t bother with it initially (I think it comes in different mounts too, which are more easily adaptable to Canon DSLRs). So in the end I decided to try out the lens with my Sony NEX 5N, which keeps impressing me every time I’m using it; such a powerful, fully featured camera in such a small body with a very affordable price tag too. I bought a cheap MD to NEX adapter on eBay, without any additional glass that could affect the performance and it works as good as one could wish for. Being quite a heavy lens at 1.2kg, the Tokina 80-200 really benefits from having a sturdy, metal tripod ring mount, especially when used with such a tiny camera like 5n. For the test shoot, the lens was supporting the camera, rather than other way round. It really helped with the stability and there was no problem with the lens being front heavy. The lens itself is all metal too, except the clip-on lens hood, which is plastic (I have no problem with that). If my info is current the AT-X is the professional Tokina range (something like L to Canon) and it definitely feels like it’s built for professional use. This is a very solid lens with a really nice, wide, smooth focusing ring, perfect for manual focusing. The lens does extend ever so slightly when focusing, but not much. The front 77mm multicoated element looks very impressive too, but what is really special about this lens is it’s constant aperture of f/2.8 throughout the focal range. It puts this lens up against the big boys like Canon’s 70-200mm f/2.8 and Nikon’s 80-200mm f/2.8. These lenses are very expensive comparing to Tokina (up to 10 times more expensive!), but they are excellent and certainly worth their price, but what if one can’t afford a Canon or Nikon? Should they go for a cheaper, slower version like Canon’s 70-200mm f/4? I believe that this Tokina offers much than a slower modern equivalent by one of the leading brands. It’s still about 4 times cheaper even that Canon 70-200mm f/4, so I believe this is one of the cheapest fast alternatives to Canon and Nikon fast, long zooms. At the time of writing there are 4 Tokina AT-X 80-200mm lenses on eBay, one going at "buy ti now" price of under $200 and another about $250, which is an absolute bargain, considering that the lens performs well and I hope you’ll agree with me that it does produce some very lovely images. I was mostly testing it at 200mm because this is what makes it special; not really the 80mm or 100mm at f/2.8, but 200mm at f/2.8. I’m very impressed with the bokeh it producing even at f/5.6, but I would say the sweet spot for the lens is f/4. Like most lenses it certainly benefits from being stepped down by a stop or two. The f/2.8 is definitely usable is the situations that demand for it (low light scene for example) but there is plenty of shallow depth of field at f/4, so that is where I’ll mostly stay.

I haven’t used neither the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8 or Nikon 80-200mm f/2.8, so I can’t comment on how well they perform wide open, but like I said, most of the lenses benefit from being stepped down a bit and there is nothing wrong with that, especially if your not paying thousands of $/£ for a lens.

Anything I don’t like about the lens, or the images it produces? Well, I’m not too keen on the pull-push zoom design, which makes it almost impossible to zoom in or out smoothly during the recording. With DSLRs I don’t tend to do that anyway, so not a big problem. A bigger problem for me is the presence for the chromatic aberration, definitely not as much as in some other lenses I’ve tested, but it’s almost always there, mostly in out-of-focus highlights and extreme light spots of the image. The bad thing is that it doesn’t really go away completely even when the lens is stepped down to something like f/5.6, so that is my biggest problem.

Nevertheless at this price the images are still mind blowing and this is one of these great lenses that are only cheap because majority are not aware of their existence and this is exactly what the budgetfilmmkaer.co.uk mentality is about; it’s about finding good stuff that is affordable and is good value for money, not about crap stuff that is cheap to buy or even worse, expensive, so I highly recommend this lens, just make sure you buy the one which compatible with your camera, preferably without any adapters that contain glass in them because it’s likely to affect the performance of the lens, softening the image at very least, which would make the whole thing a bit pointless.

Hope this info is useful to you guys and it will help save you some money on your future lenses. Stay tuned for many more lens tests and my future lens giveaways.

It’s time of a new lens giveaway and as promised this time I’m giving away 4 lenses, so more of you guys will have a chance of winning.

The lenses I’m giving away are Helios 58mm f/2 primes. They are great for low light and archiving a very nice, shallow depth of field. I’ve tested these lenses and I was really impressed with the performance. You can check out my test videos on my youtube channel.

3 of the lenses are Helios 44M which are older, more common 9 aperture blade version and 1 of the lenses is Helios 44M-4, which is virtually the same, but slightly newer, 6 aperture blade version.

All of the lenses come with both lens caps and are still in great optical condition. A couple have slightly stiff focus rings, which is common for these lenses, but still work fine. I will post these anywhere in the world for free, so don’t let you location stop you from entering; my last lens was won by someone in Algeria.

Since I’m giving away 4 lenses rather than 1, I hope that there will be more entries, so I decided to try out the raffle website called rafflecopter.com to help me track all the entries and make things cleaner.

Entering is very simple as before, all you need to do is complete 1 of 6 steps below. At first I made 3 mandatory, but then decided that I don't want to restrict people from entering just because they don't have a Tweeter or Facebook account, so yo qualify for 1 entree you only need to complete 1 point, but completing all 6 will give you higher chance of winner. Please note, that the winner will NOT be chosen by the amount of point. The extra points will just give extra entries: 1 point = 1 entree, 2 points = 2 entries , 3 points + 3 entries, etc. To earn yourself extra entries you can also tweet the message shown in the widget below once every day, just make sure that you do it through rafflecopter widget below. Any entries made in any other way will not be entered into competition, only the ones processed through rafflecopter.

Good luck to everyone entering and the winners will be announced in 2 weeks time, once the competition is over.

As you may know, I don’t have any sponsors and I fund all my giveaways myself. I giveaway what I can and as often as I can. If you like my giveaways and would like to help me fund my future giveaway, please consider donating anything that could go towards new prizes. If you can’t spare anything, you can still help, by spreading the word about www.budgetfilmmaker.co.uk. All your help is greatly appreciated

I’ve tested both of these lenses before, so the individual write-ups and opinions can be found here (for Olympus) and here (for Helios).

Someone on the website asked me what was better just considering the image quality Olympus Zuiko 50mm f/1.4 or Helios 44m 58mm f/2, so I decided to do this quick test with my Olympus and the Helios I’ve used in my previous test.

I think the results in the video are quite obvious, Olympus performs much better at f/2, which means it’s already slightly stepped down and you are getting more out of it than the Helios, which at f/2 is wide open. To get more out of your lens you generally want to step it down a little bit. It is really hard to judge the sharpness from a video anyway and in the video mode lenses are much more forgiving, so to get a better idea about sharpness I’ve also included some photos. Again with all the compression the video goes through you can’t judge the sharpness that well. So have a looks at some side by side crops below.

I think in the video I didn’t used the best Helios photos I actually managed to take during the test. Maybe the focus was just slightly out, which introduced a lot of glow and some chromatic aberration around the highlights. So below you can see these close ups again (click to enlarge). I found that the second badge of Helios test shots was much better than the first and in this one even at f/2 there is very little difference between these 2 lenses. If anything I think Helios produces better results, with lens less chromatic aberration and ghosting around the highlights that can be seen in Olympus crop. Absolutely amazing considering the price of this lens.

Both lenses definitely benefit from being stepped down to f/2.8 and you are getting a really nice image from both at this f-stop. In the video test, Olympus still looked better, but the close-ups below are virtually identical and Helios has virtually no chromatic aberration around highlights where Olympus still has some red/pink ghosting around the edges.

At f/5.6 I think Helios is sharper, but Olympus performs quite nicely too. I perform the warmer look of Helios too, although there is nothing wrong with Olympus.

I think the very crucial thing with these lenses is to get the focus right. The difference between the Helios close-ups that were maybe just a bit out and the ones that were spot on is massive, not only in sharpness levels, but also chromatic aberration and ghosting.

I think both of these lenses offer great value for money. Olympus is one of the cheaper 50mm f/1.4 and performs great and Helios is just incredible value for money, being one of the cheapest lenses you can buy, the results it produces are amazing. If you are stuck with your plasticky, slow kit lens, go and get one of these babies. At f/2 it is quite a fast lens and it well be a great lens for your mid to close people shots. At this price you can’t go wrong.

If you still can’t be bothered to buy one, then stay tuned, because I will be giving away a few of my Helios lenses very soon.

Click to enlarge

Both lenses definitely benefit from being stepped down to f/2.8 and you are getting a really nice image from both at this f-stop. In the video test, Olympus still looked better, but the close-ups below are virtually identical and Helios has virtually no chromatic aberration around highlights where Olympus still has some red/pink ghosting around the edges.

Click to enlarge

At f/5.6 Helios is sharper, but Olympus performs quite nicely too. There isn't much between them at this stage and in video mode you couldn't tell the difference.

Click to enlarge

I think the very crucial thing with these lenses is to get the focus right. The difference between the Helios close-ups that were maybe just a bit out and the ones that were spot on is massive, not only in sharpness levels, but also chromatic aberration and ghosting.

I think both of these lenses offer great value for money. Olympus is one of the cheaper 50mm f/1.4 and performs great and Helios is just incredible value for money, being one of the cheapest lenses you can buy, the results it produces are amazing. If you are stuck with your plasticky, slow kit lens, go and get one of these babies. At f/2 it is quite a fast lens and it well be a great lens for your mid to close people shots. At this price you can’t go wrong.

If you still can’t be bothered to buy one, then stay tuned, because I will be giving away a few of my Helios lenses very soon.

Above is a very simple test I’ve done on 3 great 50mm f/1.4 lenses. I often use a Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 and everyone knows that it’s a great lens, although the focusing ring is certainly not the best. A few months I shot a little test video with Nikon 50mm f/1.4 and I really enjoyed using it. The Nikon 50mm performed really well and this lens along with other Nikons is very popular amongst the DSLR/Large-Chip-Camcorder filmmakers. The third lens in this test is the least popular and the cheapest out of 3, the Olympus Zuiko OM 50mm f/1.4. It is also the smallest and probably the lightest lens in this test.

The purpose of this test was to determine how well does Olympus stack up against the more (and more expensive) popular alternatives. Below are my own thoughts about the results. You are more than welcome to share your own thoughts and the comments below.

The first test was to determine how nice is the bokeh from these 3 lenses. Wide open all 3 lenses have nice, soft bokeh. The Canon, probably has the softest, Olympus is also really good, but I would say Nikon was producing the least round out-of- focus circles. I personally prefer round circles. At f/2.0 Canon and Olympus still managed to produce circle bokeh circles, while Nikon was producing heptagon bokeh, which is still fine, but I just prefer circle bokeh. Pretty much the same goes for f/2.8.

Next and much more important test was to determine the sharpness of each lens at different f-stops. In my 200% timeline video crop test, the Olympus really surprised me. At f/1.4 it appeared to have the best sharpness out of 3. It also handled the highlights from the lights at the fruit stand really well, probably even better than the 4 times more expensive Canon. Nikon had the most ghosting.

At f/2.0 Nikon has really caught up and actually performed better than Olympus. Canon performed nicely as expected.

As I was stepping down the aperture, Nikon kept getting better and probably performed the best at f/2.8. Canon was very close and Olympus stayed behind, although still a great performance for the money.

To get the better idea what the sharpness is really like I took some photos with each lens and placed on the timeline at the 400% crop. This gave a much better picture of how each lens really perforce.

At f/1.4 all 3 lenses have very similar sharpness, but Canon actually has the most chromatic aberration. At f/2.0 Nikon performed better than the other 2.

At f/2.8 Nikon was still slightly ahead of other 2 and I think when stepped down it actually performs the best, which probably explains why Nikons are so popular.

Anyone who would buy the Nikon or Olympus, would probably buy them for video work only as there is obviously no auto focusing on these lenses. The difference in image quality is not that different, especially in video mode. Both Olympus and Nikon lenses offer great value for money for video shooters. Both have very nice focusing rings (much better than Canon’s), on-lens aperture adjustment (great for different brand cameras) and they are much cheaper than the Canon (Olympus being the cheapest and Nikon slightly more expensive, but still 3 times cheaper than Canon), so if you are only using your DSLR for video, there is really no point buying Canon EF. The Canon lens is great for photographers, but does not offer such a great value for money for videographers. All 3 lenses really benefit from being stepped down to at least f/2.0. For me Olympus is probably the best wide open, so really a great choice for them low light. My Olympus is not even is such a great shape, there is some dust and spots of fungus inside, which might have affected the performance slightly. I wonder what it would have been like if it was in such a great condition as my Nikon. I have to say Nikon was probably overall the best performer for the money.

Conclusion:

Canon lens wasn’t mine; Nikon is great, but focuses clockwise unlike my Canon lenses (which is the pain with a follow focus), so I’m keeping the Olympus to be my 50mm f/1.4 for now.

I highly recommend this lens for anyone wanting to invest into some fast glass at a bargain price. If you are Nikon person, then Nikon 50mm is a better choice.

Above you can see a quick test I’ve done with this lens while out in a local park. It was really bright and I couldn’t use this lens at wide open aperture, so I think this test footage doesn’t do the justice do to this lens. I really need to test it out in low light next time. At f/2 is should be a great low light performer. I’ve also done some quick tests against the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4, which is a great lens and while Canon produced better results in my test, it wasn’t 10 times better, but it’s 20 times more expensive than Helios, so in my opinion, Helios offers much better value for money than Canon.

Helios 44M is one of the first lenses that started my interest in vintage manual photo lenses for video use. It is a very interesting lens, not only it is one of the cheapest lenses you can buy, but it’s also apparently a Zeiss Biotar copy. The lens optics were based on Zeiss formulas, so these lenses are apparently very sharp, considering you get a good copy. Apparently the quality control was quite poor, so optical quality varies. It is possible that the lens I tested against Canon was not the best optically.

The lens itself is very well built, it’s fully metal, with a nice, long through focusing ring (about 270 degrees). I have 4 of these lenses and a few have slightly stiff focusing rings, so that is something worth bearing in mind.

You can find out a bit more about this lens in a great article I found here. This lens must be the biggest bargain ever. The first Helios 44m I bought, cost me just £3. “Carl Zeiss” quality lens for under £10? That must be the best kept secret in budget filmmaking world, or was I just blinded by “Canon-Only” world around me? If you didn’t know about this lens, now you know, so don’t hesitate even for a second to get one, at £10-£20 what have you got to loose? In the worst-case scenario you can sell it back on eBay.

I will be giving away a few of these lenses in my next giveaway, but if you can’t wait, just pick one up and you won’t regret it.

If you read my post on my Helios 44-2 58mm f/2 lens, you will know that I decided to giveaway this lens. It’s a great little prime. It is a really old lens, so cosmetic condition is not great, but optically it's still fine and performs just great. It has both lens caps and a very easily adaptable M42 mount.

It’s is not an expensive lens and might not be a highly desirable prize, but it’s very simple to enter and it will only take a few minutes of your time.

You will also need to tweet this message from your profile: Please RT, Great Change to win a Helios 44-2 58mm f/2 prime lens. Check out the details here: http://www.budgetfilmmaker.co.uk/1/post/2012/02/win-a-helios-44-2-58mm-f2-lens.html #Heliosgiveaway1

I will be able to track you down by the hash-tag and add you to the raffle.

You don’t have to enter in all 3 platforms, you can use only 1, but if you enter in all 3 your chances will of course increase. It makes sense to do that anyway, because you most likely have different profile user names on each site anyway and you could cheat this way anyway and enter 3 times. Even if you have exactly the same names on all 3 sites, you name will still be counted 3 times.

Please no cheating though, just one entry from each platform. If I see that the profile was created just few days ago and it’s empty, I’ll have to ignore such entry, as such page would like the profile was just created to enter and might be one of a few my the same person.

I will be happy to send this lens anywhere in the world for free, so no restrictions in that sense.

You can enter until the midnight on Sunday, the 4th of March. I will announce the winner on Monday, the 5th.

Good luck to everyone entering. If you don’t win this time there will be many more opportunities in future. I’m not rich, but I will try to do 1 giveaway each month, so stay tuned.

Above you can see some test footage which I shot with a Helios 44-2 58mm f/2 lens. In my opinion this vintage Russian lens is very special. It has a very nice look to it and when shooting into the sun it creates very interesting flares that add a lot of character to the footage. It’s not suitable for every scenario, but I think it definitely adds a very cool oldschool film look the footage shot with it. I personally really like the result I was able to achieve with this lens and it’s not just about the flares. The lens is really sharp and close focusing ability makes it a really good lens for close-ups (see 0:49 of the video). The colors are really good too and the maximum aperture of f/2 is great for low light shots. One of the nicest things about this lens though is the fluid aperture adjustment. This not something that is usually found in photo lenses. It lets you adjust the aperture in a smooth way, so you can easily fine-tune your aperture while recording without a sudden change of brightness. This feature was very handy when I was filming the BMX riders coming into the bright daylight and back under the roof where it was much darker. I was able to adjust the aperture very easily and smoothly without it being obvious in the shot. This a feature that is usually reserved to Cine lenses, so it is so nice to see it in this budget lens. The focus ring on my copy is really smooth and has long through, which meant I was able make really smooth, subtle focusing adjustments, which is what you would usually want from a lens used for video.

A lot of modern auto-focusing lenses have a very short through, which helps the autofocus motors achieve the focus quicker for photography needs, however for video this is actually a big downside, so good old manual lenses are so much better for manual focusing. They also have hard stops, which are important if you use a follow focus and focusing marks. Again, some modern lenses, Canon EF in particular don’t have any hard stops.

I keep telling people that the reason why modern lenses are so much more expensive that the old glass is not only because they have great optics, but also because they have great, fast auto focusing motors, which obviously makes a massive impact on the price. After all, these are photography lenses made for modern sophisticate cameras with fancy auto focusing systems. I said it before and I’ll say it again: if you are only doing video work with you DSLR then there is really no need to buy modern Canon, Nikon, Panasonic, etc glass. You can get so much more for your money if you invest into manual lenses and they don’t have to be as cheap as this Helios. Even very popular manual Nikon and Zeiss lenses will cost so much less that a modern equivalent which will not necessarily be better for video work.

If you are on a tight budget though, I highly recommend this Helios 44-2 58mm lens. It is a great mid/close up lens and it is so cheap that anyone can afford it.

I have 2 of them and I will be giving away one shortly. Stay tune for more details.